I’ve wanted to move to Linux for years. Two things kept stalling me. First, the sheer number of distros — I’d tried Arch once and found it a bit much, ran Ubuntu through university (fine, nothing special), and every time I looked for something developer-focused the options were paralysing. Second, gaming — or rather Rocket League, once a day, the extent of my hobby.
Omarchy solved the first problem. It’s curated by a developer I respect, and that alone made up my mind. The second problem solved itself: Rocket League runs cleanly on Linux via the Heroic Game Launcher. Bonus, not deciding factor.
Why Omarchy
I’d tried vanilla Arch before — notoriously fiddly. I burned a weekend trying to install it alongside Windows on a single drive, wrestling with repartitioning and an undersized EFI partition. Learned a lot, never finished.
Omarchy is an opinionated Arch install put together by DHH (creator of Ruby on Rails). Flash a USB, boot, done. A programmer-friendly distro curated by a programmer I respect was an easy sell.
What I like
- Tiling window manager — going back to floating feels broken.
- Workspaces — barely touched them on Windows; feel native here.
- Sensible defaults — I’m still running mostly stock and it’s fine.
It comes with some bloat — DHH bundles his own preferences — but the floor is high enough that I haven’t felt the need to strip it down.
What’s next
Eventually I want to do a vanilla Arch install and tailor everything from scratch. This is the feet-wet phase. Until then, I’m enjoying having Neovim as my daily driver outside of work, with the VS Code plugin filling in at the office.